Methodology for the Construction of Ontologies: An Interdisciplinary Proposal

Tracking #: 529-1509

Authors:

Responsible editor:

Oscar Corcho

Submission Type:

Research Paper

Abstract:

Ontologies can support complex processes such as the organization and information retrieval. However, the lack of methodological standardization on ontologies development has greatly hampered its adoption in the construction processes, although it is widely used in Information and Computing Sciences. Thus, this work, as a way to unify the best practices for ontologies building, presents a Literature Systematic Review that addresses the best practices and unifies in a new methodological proposal. So, a methodological approach for the development of ontologies will be presented and discussed in an applicationto build the ONTOREGULA-SUS Ontology

Decision:

Overall Impression: BadSuggested Decision: RejectTechnical Quality of the paper: BadPresentation: GoodReviewer`s confidence: HighSignificance: High significanceBackground: Incomplete or inappropriateNovelty: Lack of noveltyData availability: All used and produced data (if any) are FAIR and openly available in established data repositoriesLength of the manuscript: The length of this manuscript is about right

Summary of paper in a few sentences:

The authors presents a state of the art in methodologies to develop ontologies, and arrive to the conclusion that no standard methodology is available and that, therefore, a new one should be elaborated. In the same paper, they address the proposal of such a methodology.

Reasons to accept:

The paper should not be accepted.

Reasons to reject:

The paper exhibits important deficiencies. First of all, the most recent papers cited in the bibligraphy were published by at least one of the author of the present paper. The rest of the papers were published in 2010 or before. Thus, key papers on ontology patters or collaborative development are not mentioned. Likewise, in the presentation of the methodologies of the 90s and the beginning of the 2000s, a fundamental book, "Ontological Engineering" by Gómez-Pérez and colleagues, is not cited. This ommision is important, for example, because a lot of details about Methontology are provided. Neither are the application of test driven development or agile methodologies to ontology development referred.

The lacks in the state of the question are propagated to the proposed ontology.

Focussing on more theoretical aspects of the paper, at the beginning of the introduction, when the notion of ontology both in philosophy and engineering is presented, key authors like Nicola Guarino or Tom Gruber are ommitted.

There are also statements that are not proved. For example, in the abstract of the paper, it is said "the lack of methodological standarization on ontologies development has greatly hampered its adoption in the construction process". Facts supporting this statement in a convincing way are not provided.

Overall Impression: WeakSuggested Decision: RejectTechnical Quality of the paper: WeakPresentation: GoodReviewer`s confidence: HighSignificance: Low significanceBackground: ComprehensiveNovelty: Lack of noveltyData availability: Not all used and produced data are FAIR and openly available in established data repositories; authors need to fix thisLength of the manuscript: The authors need to elaborate more on certain aspects and the manuscript should therefore be extended (if the general length limit is already reached, I urge the editor to allow for an exception)

Summary of paper in a few sentences:

This paper covers the area of creating ontology using a methodological approach as it is the case in software engineering. The authors assumes that there is missing a standardized ontology development process. For that reason, they propose to unify best practices for ontology building from the SoA. The authors dedicates a systematic review of literature before proposing their methodological approach, which is then validated in building an ontology in the health domain.

Reasons to accept:

I don't find any reason to accept the paper in its current state for a research paper. I strongly suggest the authors to submit a survey paper on the topic.

Reasons to reject:

The main contribution of the paper is a review of the methodologies for the construction of ontologies. The proposed methodology, which is supposed to fill the gap of the existing approaches is a kind of revisiting the work of Silva (2008) without a clear justification of yet another methodology. The absence of links to the ontology and the resources used for the validation of the proposed methodology makes even harder to assess the work.
The work makes good references to existing work on ontology methodologies and compare between them in a systematic manner. However, the work does not provide any new insights compared to at least two methodologies cited in the paper, NeOn methodology and Silva (2008).
The application of the proposed methodology is not evaluated in a sound manner. It is difficult to assess the ontology developed (no link provided), no empirical o detailed evaluation of the ontology.

Further comments:

Details comments/suggestions:
-P.1: “Possessing relevant importance for the field of artificial intelligence, mainly for the artificial cognitive process..” Please rewrite this sentence
-P.2: What do you mean by an ontology serving diverse categories...Do you mean “different domains”?
-P3: Why duplicating keywords listed? Any importance of mentioning those duplicates? “It is important to note that bases such as Google” - please rewrite
-P4: It is not clear what do you mean in this sentence: “And the second group, which has solutions for the consensual construction of the definition of knowledge, not proposing complete methodologies”- please rewrite.
-P6: s/Requirements Specificationphase/Requirements Specification: phase
-P8: The caption should be “Figure 1” not “Image 1”. Also, wouldn’t be better to transform it as a table and reduce space?
-P9: “the process of formalization of the ontology through the tooling that uses descriptive logic”. Which tool? Do you mean NeOn does not provide a tool for creating ontologies using OWL API? Have you tested the NeOn toolkit and related plugins?
- In Table 4, It is not clear to me the difference you make between formalization and interpretation. How do you distinguish clearly those two steps in the ontology development?
-P12: Don’t start a sentence with [ref] like “[11] recommends”
-P13: Typo s/Fernadez/Fernandez
-P14: Give the types of the heterogeneous systems mentioned in the Health System. You mention an ontology without giving any link to find it out on the Web. How can we assess it? How can we know see the step-by-step creation and validation of the ontology based on your methodology? What types of queries were executed? Some examples of rules?
-P15: Please improve readability of Image 2. I would expect to use Figure 2 instead of Image in the caption.
I suggest the author to have a look to some criteria for evaluating ontologies here http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.2016852 that might be helpful in their work.

1 Comment

The reviewers have identified important defficiencies in the paper, such as important omissions in the analysed state of the art, as well as not systematic analyses of the methodologies that have been checked.